


O most beloved; We share one soul

by j_gabrielle



Category: Kingsman (Movies), Pacific Rim (Movies), The King's Man
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drift Compatibility, Established Relationship, Incest, Kissing, Light Angst, M/M, Parent/Child Incest, The Drift (Pacific Rim), background Hartwin, fighting Kaijus are the background of this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-23 05:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20002891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_gabrielle/pseuds/j_gabrielle
Summary: "Haven't you heard? The world is coming to an end. You always wanted a chance to fight, now here it is again. So where would you rather die? Here, or in a Jaeger?"Conrad turns back to face him, and that's when his father says, "And who said that you'd be Drifting with anyone else but me?"





	O most beloved; We share one soul

**Author's Note:**

> Again, my thanks to the wonderful stebeee, and also to aozu, my daring enabler x
> 
> Title is taken from 'An Oresteia' as translated by Anne Carson
> 
> I worked on this and I just want it out there and not in my drafts already. Just take this from me.

**I.**

Conrad hears him first; footfalls heavy on the floor of the workshop, deliberate rhythms of someone moving with focus and intent that cuts through the daily chaos of building the Wall. He hears him when he stops, making the other man wait for two beats before he turns, and it is like the world falling away, focus zeroing in on the figure in the heavy jacket, face flushed from the cold.

And in that instance, it is like Conrad is eight and thirteen and seventeen all at once; still that boy with skinned knees, the child who lost his mother too young, looking up at his father who he loved too much to be healthy.

His gaze flickers to the cane and has to turn away

"May I have a word?" His father asks. As if he has any say in this matter.

He swallows tightly and unstraps his gear, inhaling a lungful of air thick with rust and smoke. The foreman is watching him with naked curiosity, so are about a hundred other eyes. Shoving his gear into its holding. Jerking his head to the side, he says with affected ease, "Step into my office, Your Grace."

Conrad leads them to a quieter part of the building, hands tucked into the safety of his pockets. He resists the urge to look, to take his fill of his father, curling his palm into fists when the itch to reach out and throw his arms around his father burns a touch too bright.

"It has been a while," Father says, the cane making a steady counterpart to the sound of his shoes on the concrete.

"Two years and four months," Conrad says easily. "What do you want?"

It's not easy to keep his eyes away from his father, so he keeps finding his line of sight falling on him. He has aged, Conrad notes. Of course, he has. There is a huge yawning chasm between them, and somewhere deep in the darkest parts of his mind and heart where he has hidden all his silent desires, he thinks that father looks good.

Father's blue eyes are steely with resolve and when he speaks, it sends licks of reflamed thirst in his veins. "I have spent the better part of a year activating everything I could get my hands on. There's an old Jaeger. Mark 3. You may know it. She needs a pilot."

Conrad scoffs. "I'm guessing I wasn't your first choice."

Father looks pained, and he swallows visibly. "Conrad, what happened with us--"

"Look, I can't have anyone else in my head again," He interrupts, hands in his pockets pressing into his thighs. Panic cords around his heart and squeezes tight. He ducks his head, inhaling deep. Taking two steps closer to his father, he allows their shoulders to brush. "Sometimes, if I listen, if I am very still, I can still hear you screaming in my head when that Kaiju tore you out of the Conn-pod. I can't, not again. I'm sorry."

His eyes search his father's, willing him for once to actually listen, to understand what he was trying to say. For a moment, he wished with all he had in him that they could still feel the 'Ghost Drift' - but that connection had been severed a long time ago, and Conrad feels a sudden crushing grip of sadness that overwhelms him.

He makes for the door, quickly finding his feet stuck still to the ground when his father speaks, voice echoing in the cavernous space around them. "Haven't you heard? The world is coming to an end. You always wanted a chance to fight, now here it is again. So where would you rather die? Here, or in a Jaeger?"

Conrad turns back to face him, and that's when his father says, "And who said that you'd be Drifting with anyone else but me?"

**(Addendum)**

It had always been there between them. Sitting like some neglected forlorn spectre in the disused attics of their minds, having evolved and reshaped with the progression of time and age.

Conrad hadn't met his father until he was five and even then, it was an awkward silence in front of a Greggs over sausage rolls. Mum hadn't said much about him or how they met and then divorced, but then again by the time she died when he was eight and he had taken Father's hand, leaving with him right after the funeral.

He'd grown up on the grounds of various Shatterdomes and training academies, trailing after his father, always two steps behind until the day Marshall Pentecost calls for a compatibility test in the Kwoon, and he had slipped his name onto the list with his best smile and a bribe for Mako.

Father had told him that he won't take it easy on him and Conrad, being seventeen and cocky, had told him that he wouldn't either. They'd gone six for six with the Bo staff, matching each other with quick, decisive moves that felt more like a conversation and a dance; distilling all the things they couldn't yet say out loud into the way their bodies responded, all the world fading away until it was just them on the mat, eyes fixed on each other. 

They Drifted for the first time the next day and their Neural Handshake was strong.

**II.**

Harry Hart and his co-pilot Eggsy Unwin welcome him back into the fold with easy camaraderie born of an existing friendship that the two younger men had kept up in the intervening years. Well, Eggsy does more of the welcoming while Harry sits next to him, watching them talk about the old missions they ran.

Soon, their dog JB barks insistently and Eggsy excuses himself, telling him that he needs to take him out for a leak. Conrad watches the other man leave, dog trailing along behind him. His eyes lift and his breath hitches at the sight of his father talking to one of the technicians up on the walkway. 

"You're worried about him."

Harry smiles warmly at him, leaning over to refill his cup of water. "Or is it more than that?"

Conrad doesn't answer, cradling the cup between his hands. "For the first three days after they found me on the beach, I was in a haze of pain and drugs. Drowning in my guilt and my grief. I thought I lost him when that Kaiju..." He licks his lips. "And then they found him, but I couldn't deal with it, so I left."

Neither of them speaks, but Harry holds his gaze steadily. 

"When I had heard what had happened, I had feared the worst. And then they told me you brought your Jaeger back to shore all by yourself. The third person to ever do it after Pentecost and Becket. Afterwards, they told me they found him. Badly injured, comatose, but alive. And when I came to visit him in the hospital wing, they told me you left."

Harry's censure is there in the soft lilt of his voice. Conrad nods. He rubs his thumb over the rim of the cup. "I left, and then he brought me back."

"And now you'll be drifting together again."

"Yeah," Conrad murmurs, looking back to when his father is standing in his dress blues; a stark figure against the grime and weariness of the Shatterdome. He turns and his deep-set eyes pierce him from across the room. Conrad does not look away. "I'm Drifting with him again." 

**III.**

To call what happened during their attempt at reestablishing a neural handshake a 'Failure' would be a severe understatement. 

Conrad chokes on a half-formed scream when the pain from the old circuit burn flares and locks up his left side. He closes his eyes, thanking the divine that he is at least breaking down in the privacy of his own room, sitting down heavily on his bed, riding the wave of agony until gently hands touch him by the nape. "Here, let me."

He doesn't fight him, allowing himself to be cared for by the familiar, soothing motions of his father removing his shirt, thumbs tracking weight and motion on his pressure points repeatedly until some of the tension in his muscles release.

Conrad clenches and rolls his fists. "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"I chased the RABIT. I broke the connection," He says. He feels a familiar uncomfortable burn prickling at the corners of his eyes, feeling the crushing disappointment rising in him. "I--"

"I put us out of sync first." Father releases him, gently tilting him by the chin to face him. "If anyone is to be blamed for this, it would be me." His stern eyes are calm, without any trace of anger or sadness. Conrad doesn't nod but has to look away. 

The first rush of memories had felt like 

"How often does this happen?"

"Often enough. You want to ask if I'd gotten help whilst working on the Wall. Not many people out there who know how to treat a broken down Jaeger pilot and even lesser still who would charge me a fair price for it."

They sit together in the industrial hum of his room. Logically, he knows that Marshall Pentecost can't afford to lose them. They'll get another shot at piloting the Jaeger, but it won't come without a lot of doubt. And then it strikes him; in the week since he's been here, this is the first time they've been truly alone together. 

He becomes distinctly aware of the bareness of his torso. His scars sit stark and modulated on his skin, and he catches the light in Father's eyes when he looks at them. 

"Why did you run?"

Conrad cannot breathe for the tenderness in his voice. The words are said in a quiet serenity, but each one feels like a thousand arrows lancing through him, bleeding him dry of composure and reason.

"I was scared. I was weak. I couldn't handle the fact that your last words to me were that you loved me, and I could taste the way you meant it. I took one look at you in the Med Bay and I just... I _couldn't_ ," Conrad hisses, throws himself to his feet, curling his arms around himself. He glances over at Father, clenching his jaw. "You died. In my head and I felt it. I remembered it." The tension in his shoulders deflates, all fight fleeing. "I remember all of it."

Father carefully regards him. Something must have travelled through the remnant of their failed neural handshake because Conrad feels that familiar flush of emotions not his own. God, how he had missed this; this knowing of the other that went beyond words, beyond understanding. It was an anomaly that no one outside the 

Eventually, Father ambles to his feet, shuffling closer to him. Conrad does not take a step back, but it's a near thing. He slips his palm to Conrads, and then his other to caress his cheek. The air in his lungs rattles out in a rush of dispellation. 

Their bodies fold into each other, minds echoing a tendril of the Drift between them. He allows himself to be held, rearranged into the warmth of Father's arms. "

The urge to run away once more rears its head like a demon, but he pulls himself away from it. Choosing instead to bask in the way Father's touch speaks of absolution, resolution and revelation. A warm hand settles itself on the base of his spine. He submits to the feeling.

**(Addendum)**

Conrad kissed him first. Eighteen, heart aching for the lost of something he has never known, mind hungering with a single-minded ferocity for the enlightenment of how his own blood and flesh would taste in a kiss, he kissed him, stumbling into his lap, chasing his mouth like it held the key to all the mysteries of the world.

It could have been some long-buried desire, come fore. It could have been the Drift shining a light on the jagged, brittle and shadowed parts of their secret places. Whatever it was, it didn't matter. All Conrad knew was that he had loved this man before he knew what love was, and all that he cared about was his graceless heart thundering a wild beat in his ears when he licks and sucks and rubs his tongue against his father's.

He wished he was drunk on some of the Russian moonshine that got passed around a lot in Vladivostok. But he wasn't, even if he feels like he was.

Father did not push him away.

**IV.**

"Let's shoot it again," Conrad says. "Just in case."

And Father had merely smiled. He's in his head. He knows. 

**V.**

He bangs his fists repeatedly on the shell of the pod. Tears blurring his eyes, desperation a choking vice around his chest. Distantly he can hear Eggsy's voice in his ear telling him that they're close to them so hang on, sound off, come on, come in, say something...

The pod unlocks and Conrad surges in, hauling his father's unconscious body up, sobbing when the stat function declares that no pulse can be found. "Please," He begs repeatedly, heated streaks burning tracks down his cheeks. The thought that Conrad could lose his father this soon, again, after gaining him back into his life is one he cannot entertain. 

Clinging on to him, Conrad buries his grief into the crook of his father's neck. "You promised me that I won't be alone again. Please... Don't leave me now, please-" His voice breaks. He can't feel anything from him in his mind. He is alone.

"You're squeezing me too tight..."

Conrad pulls back, eyes wide with disbelief. Father is smiling up at him, eyes exhausted slits. He weeps then; uncaring that there's a full room of people back at the LOCCENT listening in, that Harry and Eggsy in their Rogue Oxford were on the way to them. Deep, heart-shattering lung fulls of laughter and crying in a heady hurricane of relief and happiness wrench themselves out of him because he can feel the same whispers being coaxed in a welcomed return to him in his mind.

Father reaches for him and he falls into his embrace. When he tilts his head up, lips brushing to lips, he feels his relief leech out of him when he reaches back, hands in Father's hair, chasing every soft exhalation, every quiet noise.

"I promised. Didn't I?" Father presses their foreheads together. 

Conrad laughs, wet and not a little strangled. He closes his eyes, breathing in deep the blossoming hope that warms him from the inside out. He kisses Father's smiling lips once more, slowly, deeply. He doesn't have to reply. Father already knows.

**(Afterword)**

The late afternoon breeze carries with it the brine of the sea and the promise of rain. He really should get up to close the shutters of the home they'd bought with their savings and bring in the clothes still on the line. But Conrad feels too comfortable here; lying half-naked on their bed, luxuriating under the tracing tip-tapping of his father's fingers down the line of his spine.

He turns his head on the pillow to face him, smiling when he sees the open contentment on Father's face, breathing in deep when he can taste the way the warm lazy lust tinged languidness in his bones is echoed incorporeally. It's not emotions, not fully, but he welcomes it.

"If you keep doing that, I'm never getting out of bed," Conrad warns him, laughing.

"Then don't. Stay."

Father reaches over and gracefully drapes his arm around his waist, brushing their noses, then their lips together in the sweetest of touches. Conrad leans in, beaming bright like the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> [read more about Ghost Drifts](https://pacificrim.fandom.com/wiki/Drift)  
> \--  
> I have never, will never, allow any reposting or translations of my works without my permission. All of my works will and shall only be hosted on my personal accounts on AO3 (j_gabrielle), Dreamwidth (j_gabrielle) and Tumblr (randomingoftherandomness, hardheartshere).
> 
> For those who say that I never said anything, it is clearly stated on my AO3 profile bio.
> 
> I do not have a Twitter account.
> 
> I do not have a Wattpad account.
> 
> **Please Do Not Repost My Fics**


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